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"Ministers are concerned about education systems' capacity to change quickly, at a time when many factors are combining to influence the shape of tomorrow's schools. In the future, schools should offer individualized and accredited programmes to learners of all ages. This means rethinking the way in which much education is currently organised, with the objective of enhancing motivation for lifelong learning and making it accessible to a much wider range of people - including adults returning to learn, the disadvantaged and those with disabilities."

Paris, 17 January 1996
MEETING OF THE EDUCATION COMMITTEE AT MINISTERIAL LEVEL:
MAKING LIFELONG LEARNING A REALITY FOR ALL

Educational Alternatives Based on Communication, Collaboration and Computers

Diana G. Oblinger, Ph.D. Manager, Solution Integration
Higher Education, IBM North America Copyright IBM Corporation 1995

"The world our children inhabit is different, radically so, than the one we inherited. An increasingly open global economy requires that all people be better educated, more skilled, more adaptable and more capable of working collaboratively." - Wingspread Report, 1993

If our students need to be able to work collaboratively, what form should education in colleges and universities take? This paper explores some of the alternatives for collaborative learning.

Today's Classroom

Begin with what happens in today's classrooms. Research and individual experience attest to lectures dominating faculty delivery styles. Research on the effectiveness of lecture and its implications on what education values are revealing.

1. Dominance of Lectures. Collaboration is a rare style in higher education classrooms. Lectures dominate: Approximately 80% of teaching is in the form of lecture. Unfortunately, the abundance of lectures does not equate with it being the most effective learning modality for all students.

2. Teaching Emphasis. "Much of classroom teaching is based on faculty presentation of information to a group of students who are then responsible for demonstrating that they have accumulated it. The instructor is on center stage and determines the official agenda of the course. In the audience of lecture halls and classrooms, students are called on occasionally to demonstrate their comprehension and are tested periodically to determine their retention. The emphasis is clearly on teaching with the expectation that if it is done well, students with ability and ambition will learn." (Lemke, 1995)

3. Little Interaction. Interaction--student-to-faculty, student-to-student, and student-to-information--is directly related to improved learning (Fletcher, 1991). However, significant interaction is lacking in most lectures. Research on classroom activity shows that, irrespective of class size, interactions between faculty and students are limited to a few individuals. In classes under 40 students, four or five students dominate the interactions. The remaining 35 are relatively passive; they abdicate in favor of a vocal few. For classes over 40 students, the number of students who interact is even smaller (Karp and Yoels, 1976). In a fifty-minute lecture period, questions and interaction comprises less than five minutes, on average. (10%)

Whatever the reason, the existing lecture model lacks significant interaction among faculty and students. However, most students find peer interaction a powerful mode of learning. Among the nation's first-year higher education students, eighty-five percent have already studied with other students and 40% have tutored their friends. Yet only 19% have asked a teacher for advice after class (Plater, 1995).

4. Inefficient Learning Experience. "The common assumption--that lecturing is an efficient way of transmitting information accurately--is wrong" (Johnstone and Su, 1994). In the average lecture, the instructor delivers about 5,000 spoken words, of which students record only about 500.

In a study of chemistry lectures, students recorded about 90 percent of the blackboard information; they assumed that the blackboard information was sufficient.

However, some parts of lectures went almost entirely unrecorded: demonstrations, examples of applications, detailed sequences of logical arguments and the meanings of technical terms and symbols.

Because of differences in student note-taking skills and in working memory, only one-third of students leave lecture with most of the information units recorded. Because lecture notes form the princip..? (Vantar rest. #)